Dylan's Visions of Sin (4 page)

The case for denying Dylan the title of poet could not summarily, if at all, be made good by any open-minded close attention to the words and his ways with them. The case would need to begin
with his medium, or rather with the mixed-media nature of song, as of drama. On the page, a poem controls its timing there and then.

Dylan is a performer of genius. So he is necessarily in the business (and the game) of playing his timing against his rhyming. The cadences, the voicing, the rhythmical draping and shaping
don’t (needless to sing) make a song superior to a poem, but they do change the hiding-places of its power. T. S. Eliot showed great savvy in maintaining that “Verse, whatever else it
may or may not be, is itself a system of
punctuation
; the usual marks of punctuation themselves are differently employed.”
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A song is a
different system of punctuation again. Dylan himself used the word “punctuate” in a quiet insistence during an interview in 1978. Ron Rosenbaum made his pitch – “It’s
the sound that you want” – and Dylan agreed and then didn’t: “Yeah, it’s the sound and the words. Words don’t interfere with it. They – they –
punctuate it. You know, they give it purpose. [
Pause
].”

“They – they – punctuate it”: this is itself dramatic punctuation, though perfectly colloquial (and Dylan went on to say “Chekhov is my favorite
writer”).
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Words: “they give it purpose. [
Pause
]”, the train of thought being that punctuation, a system of
pointing, gives point.

Not just the beauty but the force will be necessarily in the details, incarnate in a way of putting it. So that any general praises of Dylan’s art are sure to miss what matters most about
it: that it is not general, but highly and deeply individual, particular. This, while valuing human commonalty – “Of joy in widest commonalty spread”, in Wordsworth’s line.
Joy, and grief, too.

Larkin, reviewing jazz in 1965, took it on himself to nick a Dylan album. (Hope I’m not out of line.)

I’m afraid I poached Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” (CBS) out of curiosity and found myself well rewarded. Dylan’s cawing, derisive voice is
probably well suited to his material – I say probably because much of it was unintelligible to me – and his guitar adapts itself to rock (“Highway 61”) and ballad
(“Queen Jane”) admirably. There is a marathon “Desolation Row” which has an enchanting tune and mysterious, possibly half-baked words.
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“Half-baked” is overdone. But “well rewarded” pays some dues.

A poem of Larkin’s has the phrase “Love Songs” in its title and is about songs, while itself proceeding not as a song but as a poem. For when you see the poem on the page, you
can see that it is in three stanzas, and you could not at once hear – though you might know – such a thing when in the presence of a song. Larkin, we have already heard, thought that
“poetry readings grew up on a false analogy with music”: “false because people can read words, whereas they can’t read music”. But this poem of his contemplates
someone who used to be able to read music and play it on the piano, and who can still, in age, look at the sheet music and re-learn how it is done.

A widow comes across the love songs that she had played on the piano when she was young; how painfully they remind her of the large promises once made by time and even more by
love.
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That sentence exercises a summary injustice. It is not much more than perfunctory gossip, whereas Larkin’s three sentences are a poem. The poet makes these dry bones live – or
rather, since he is not a witch-doctor and the poem is not a zombie, he makes us care that these bones lived. “An ordinary sorrow of man’s life”: that is how Wordsworth spoke of
his lonely sufferer (in widowhood, likewise?) in her ruined cottage. Larkin, too, redeems the ordinary.

His is not a poem simply about life’s disappointments, but about realizing these disappointments. He reminds us that to realize is to make real. Here are three sentences that shrink as
life cannot but shrink. From 106 words to 30 to 23. The first sentence has all the amplitude of the remembered past into
which it moves. It has world enough and time, with
lovingly remembered details calmly patterned (“One bleached . . . One marked . . . One mended”), a world “set in order”. It flows on, and its own words remark on what they
are re-living – they “spread out”, they manifest a sense of “time laid up in store”. The first sentence can take its time – time is not doing the taking.

But from this leisure the second sentence dwindles. It begins with “But”, unlikely to be a reassuring start here, and instead of what is lovingly recalled, we have love itself.
Instead of the actually loved, in its inevitable imperfection (the unmentioned husband, the mentioned daughter), there is the daunting abstraction, love. Its brilliance is a “glare”,
too bright to be ignored, somehow pitiless in its “sailing above”. And if love “broke out” in those songs, here, too, there is something of an ominous suggestion. Light
breaks out, but so do wars and plagues. Love, too, can break hearts, or cannot but break hearts if we think of all that the abstraction love promised.

Then the further shrinkage into the last sentence, briefer, bleaker. Instead of the abstraction of the middle sentence, which was large and metaphorical and aerial, we reach a stony abstraction
– no metaphors, no details, no grand words like “incipience”. Simply pain generalized, compacted into the plainest words in the language. Earlier the poem had opened its mouth and
sung; in the end it bites its lip.

From copious memories recalling what promised to be a copious future, through high hopes, down to severe humbling. From a romantic compound, “spring-woken”, through a laconically dry
one, “much-mentioned”, down to uncompounded plainness. From “a tidy fit”, through the promise to “set unchangeably in order”, down to “pile them
back”.

Yet this is poetry, not prose, so it exists not only as sentences but as lines and stanzas. Larkin is a master of all such patterning. The pattern does not impose itself upon the sense, it
releases and enforces the sense. See how he uses line-endings and stanza-endings – “see how”, because this is much more possible than “hear how”. Larkin’s point
about “the disappearance of stanza shape” when you hear a poem read aloud can be extended to include our being able to see the valuable counterpointing of stanza shape and, say,
sentence shape. A song’s stanzas are less concerned to stand, more to move.

Love Songs in Age
has no stanza that is self-contained. There is a marked visual pause in passing from the first to the second stanza:

(“Sprawling hyphenated”, because the sheet-music sets the words, subdivided and stretched out, below the musical notes, so Larkin can remind us of the different
systems of punctuation that are poetical and sheet-musical.) The visual pause after “stood” is all the more effective because in the first six lines of the poem the lines have been
placidly end-stopped, tidily congruous, the units of sense at one with (rather than played against) the units of rhythm and rhyme.

Then, with “stood”, a powerful pause enforces itself – the poem pauses, rapt, just as the widow pauses here, rapt into memory. Swelling in the second stanza is a change from
the equable line-endings of the first. Instead of such a complete unit as “The covers pleased her”, there is the line “Had ushered in”, which has to move on from its
predecessor and to
usher in
its successor. The ebullience of this middle stanza spreads out over its line-endings, the clauses proliferate and spill over (“. . . in / . . .
wherein”). And then, at the very end of the stanza, a sudden drastic check:

With a harsh gracelessness, the second sentence is imperatively beginning, tugging across the cadences (and, duly, demanding a pause). If the opening of this second sentence,
“But”, is threateningly ungraceful, how much more is the third: “So” thrust out with grim emphasis, cutting across the order that immediately precedes it, insisting doggedly
on the truth:

The point of running one stanza into the next is more than to create pregnant pauses, more even than to imitate the musical interweaving of
love songs. It is to create
the austere finality of the conclusion. Only once in this poem does a full stop coincide with the end of a line or with the end of a stanza. This establishes the fullness of this stop, the
assurance that Larkin has concluded his poem and not just run out of things to say. The same authoritative finality is alive in the rhyme scheme. Larkin’s pattern (
abacbdcdd
) allows of
a clinching couplet only at the end of a stanza. He then prevents any such clinching at the end of the first two stanzas by having very strong enjambment, spilling across the line-endings. The
result is that the very last couplet is the first in the poem to release what we have been waiting for, the decisive authority of a couplet, rhyme sealing rhyme in a final settlement. But also with
a rhythmical catch in the throat, a brief stumble before “lamely”: “Was hard, without lamely admitting how” is aline that cannot move briskly, has to feel lamed, because of
the speed-bump between “without” and “lamely”. And then an inexorable ending, here and now: “and could not now”. The poem focuses time, much as time focuses
itself for us in the dentist’s chair into a concentrated “now”.

The conclusive couplet isn’t the only subtly meaningful rhyming. The gentle disyllabic, or double, rhymes of the first stanza (
pleased her / seized her, water / daughter
) create
softer cadences, all the more so because of the
-er
association among themselves. It is against this softer light that the glare of the last stanza stands out, its rhymes bleak. Only one
rhyme in the poem is inexact, and with good reason:
chord / word.
That the words of life do not quite fit its music is one of the things that the poem knows.

Love Songs in Age
is far more than a five-finger exercise in the manner of the poet whom Larkin most admired, Thomas Hardy. Like the best of Hardy, the best of Larkin lives in the context
of an imagined life. The widow’s story is there, between the poem’s lines, treated obliquely and unsentimentally. The appeal is to experiences already understood (“That hidden
freshness”, “That certainty”, “That much-mentioned brilliance”). “She kept her songs, they took so little space” – how much of an everyday sadness is
here, of possessions sold off, a home relinquished, the life lived in what Larkin elsewhere calls (in
Mr Bleaney
) a “hired box”. The songs, she kept – the piano, she could
not (though this, too, has to be glimpsed between the lines, especially in “
stood / / Relearning
. . .”). Self-possession is bound to be so much involved with possessions.

Yet the end of the poem makes a point rather different from the expected. It doesn’t say that she cried or wanted to cry, but that it was hard to cry without admitting how huge the failure
of love had been in comparison with any triumphs of love. Not hard to cry, heaven knows, but hard to
cry without dissolving, hard to admit any cause for grief without
admitting too shatteringly much. “Admitting”: in its unostentatious truth-telling, it is a perfect Larkin word. Not that memory is merely unkind. When we look back across the whole
poem, we realize that it was not only in the literal physical sense that “She kept her songs”. Meantime, the poem at least has set something unchangeably in order.

Such, at any rate, is my reading of the poem. To hear the poem read aloud, even by the poet himself, is a different story. Yet the story turns upon the same sad pertinent fact: that the only
rhyme that is not a true rhyme, the only one that is a rhyme only to the eye and not to the ear, is
chord / word
. For ever refusing to fit, to be set perfectly in order. There on the page,
like sheet-music that both is and is not the real thing.

Dylan said of
Lay, Lady, Lay
: “The song came out of those first four chords. I filled it up with the lyrics then.” And elsewhere he said something that suggests the economy
that characterizes such a poem as
Love Songs in Age
: “Every time I write a song, it’s like writing a novel. Just takes me a lot less time, and I can get it down . . . down to
where I can re-read it in my head a lot.”
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